The Opening Paragraphs of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy

The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes,
indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The
culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek
and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual
as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance,
or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its
holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it.
No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as
culture, at all. To find the real ground for the very differing
estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must find
some motive for culture in the terms of which [5/6] may lie a real
ambiguity; and such a motive the word curiosity gives us. I have
before now pointed out that in English we do not, like the
foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense;
with us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense; a
liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be
meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the
word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying
activity. In the Quarterly Review, some little time ago, was an
estimate of the celebrated French critic, Monsieur Sainte-Beuve, and
a very inadequate estimate it, in my judgment, was. And its
inadequacy consisted chiefly in this: that in our English way it left
out of sight the double sense really involved in the word curiosity,
thinking enough was said to stamp Monsieur Sainte-Beuve with blame if
it was said that he was impelled in his operations as a critic by
curiosity, and omitting either to perceive that Monsieur Sainte-Beuve
himself, and many other people with him, would consider that this was
praiseworthy and not blameworthy, or to point out why it ought really
to be accounted worthy of blame [6/7] and not of praise. For as there
is a curiosity about intellectual matters which is futile, and merely
a disease, so there is certainly a curiosity, — a desire after the
things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of
seeing them as they are, — which is, in an intelligent being, natural
and laudable. Nay, and the very desire to see things as they are
implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained
without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of the blind
and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean to blame when we
blame curiosity. Montesquieu says: — "The first motive which ought to
impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence of our
nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent."
This is the true ground to assign for the genuine scientific passion,
however manifested, and for culture, viewed simply as a fruit of this
passion; and it is a worthy ground, even though we let the term
curiosity stand to describe it.

But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the
scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are,
natural and proper in an intelligent [7/8] being, appears as the ground
of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the
impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for
stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the
sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better
and happier than we found it, — motives eminently such as are called
social, — come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and
pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having
its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of
perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not
merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but
also of the moral and social passion for doing good. As, in the
first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu's words:
"To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!" so, in the
second view of it, there is no better motto which it can have than
these words of Bishop Wilson: "To make reason and the will of God
prevail!" Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be
overhasty in determining what reason and the will of God say, because
its turn is for acting rather than thinking, and it wants to be [9]
beginning to act; and whereas it is apt to take its own conceptions,
which proceed from its own state of development and share in all the
imperfections and immaturities of this, for a basis of action; what
distinguishes culture is, that it is possessed by the scientific
passion, as well as by the passion of doing good; that it has worthy
notions of reason and the will of God, and does not readily suffer
its own crude conceptions to substitute themselves for them; and
that, knowing that no action or institution can be salutary and
stable which are not based on reason and the will of God, it is not
so bent on acting and instituting, even with the great aim of
diminishing human error and misery ever before its thoughts, but that
it can remember that acting and instituting are of little use, unless
we know how and what we ought to act and to institute.

This culture is more interesting and more far-reaching than that
other, which is founded solely on the scientific passion for knowing.
But it needs times of faith and ardour, times when the intellectual
horizon is opening and widening all round us, to flourish in. And is
not the close and bounded intellectual horizon within which we have
long lived [9/10] and moved now lifting up, and are not new lights
finding free passage to shine in upon us? For a long time there was
no passage for them to make their way in upon us, and then it was of
no use to think of adapting the world's action to them. Where was
the hope of making reason and the will of God prevail among people
who had a routine which they had christened reason and the will of
God, in which they were inextricably bound, and beyond which they had
no power of looking? But now the iron force of adhesion to the old
routine, — social, political, religious, — has wonderfully yielded;
the iron force of exclusion of all which is new has wonderfully
yielded; the danger now is, not that people should obstinately refuse
to allow anything but their old routine to pass for reason and the
will of God, but either that they should allow some novelty or other
to pass for these too easily, or else that they should underrate the
importance of them altogether, and think it enough to follow action
for its own sake, without troubling themselves to make reason and the
will of God prevail therein. Now, then, is the moment for culture to
be of service, culture which believes in making reason and the [10/11]
will of God prevail, believes in perfection, is the study and pursuit
of perfection, and is no longer debarred, by a rigid invincible
exclusion of whatever is new, from getting acceptance for its ideas,
simply because they are new.